I shot a frantic look out the window. The roof across, now empty. Down below, the dark sedan remained in its place, but the door was thrown open, the driver's seat empty. My hand shot to my pocket, instinctively checking for the magnetic key case, but it was gone, the pocket torn. I spun around desperately, the fire flicking at me. The box lay shattered near the flaming futon. Falling to my knees, I jabbed at it. Melting plastic pieces and the top half of the key. It had snapped, a perfect break right in the middle of the brass teeth, but where was the bottom? The fire closing in, I ran a hand
through the carpet, until a hot pain bored into my palm. There it was, in a nest of burned fibers. Before I could talk myself out of it, I seized it. Hot metal singed my fingertips, but I clutched it and ran toward the front door.
The fire grabbed at my pants, my hands. Mack's corpse was alight, the smell sickening. Flames ate through the cloth restraints, his corpse sagging as each gave way. I flew past and staggered through the front door into the hall.
A few neighbors were out, older folks staring shocked, a kid on an old-fashioned scooter. A sturdy man was pinning the fire door open with his heel, shouting for everyone to clear out. Past him, way down the hall, a tall, powerful figure wheeled into view around the turn.
Reid Sever.
We stared at each other, me in a half crouch, him frozen in his dark suit. And then I was on my feet, sprinting for him. His hand went to his hip, but I crashed left, hard into the laundry room, and flew out the window, landing with a bang on the pool shed six feet below. My shoes slid out from under me, and I ass-bumped and skidded off the edge, landing in a full sprawl on the concrete. The severed top of the key bounced free from my hand, knocking the pavement with the ring of a flipped coin. I rolled once and caught it just above the surface of the murky pool.
Glancing back, I saw Sever leaning out of the
laundry room, readying for the drop, smoke billowing from the neighboring window. I bolted. Over the fence, up the street, fighting my car keys out. Two blocks away and accelerating, I still couldn't catch my breath.
I had to get home before they beat me there and seized the rucksack holding that torn page of mysterious numbers.
Chapter 30
Across the street from my apartment building, an agent sat behind the wheel of a fleet Chevy, his lips moving. I couldn't make out the earpiece, not from this distance, but he wasn't talking to an imaginary friend. Was he in the corrupt cadre with Sever, or was I now official Secret Service business? Either way, more agents were en route. I wouldn't have time for finesse.
I'd left my pickup one block over in a corner spot, facing the intersection, ready to haul ass in the likely event that I was pursued. Stepping forth from behind the mail truck I'd shadowed up the street, I walked briskly to my building.
As I entered the lobby, I heard the Chevy door close behind me. I turned calmly into the stairwell, out of view, and then I bolted, taking the steps three at a time. I reached the third floor before the door banged open below, and then the agent shouted up at me, the words indistinct with stairwell echoes. Spilling out into the hall, I nearly collided with Evelyn, tugging her cat along, a leash on its rhinestone collar. Stuttering an apology, I sprinted into my condo, slamming and locking the door behind me.
Moving furiously, I swept pans and lids out of the cabinet, clawing my way to the giant pasta pot in the back. I snatched out Charlie's rucksack and threw it on, racing to the sliding glass door. Behind me I heard a yell, then splintering wood. The agent tumbled into the room as I whipped the sliding door shut behind me and leapt off the balcony, striking the phone pole harder than I'd intended. I grabbed one of the metal bars, but my other hand swiped and missed. Swinging out monkey style, the pavement a gray swirl below, I caught a glimpse through the glass of the agent rushing to the balcony. Clamping my legs around the pole, I half slid, half fell to the ground. I risked a glance over my shoulder as I ran past the Chevy with its dinging open-door alarm. The agent was straddling the three-story drop between the lip of the balcony and the top foothold of the telephone pole.
The two dark SUVs screeching onto my street interrupted my momentary relief. Rucksack flapping on my back, I sped through the opposing alley, banged through someone's back gate, and tumbled out onto the street where I'd left my truck. There it was, parked a half block up by the intersection. A sedan was parked parallel to it, and
Sever was on his feet, peering through the passenger window. The tan, square face lifted, started to turn my way.
I pivoted abruptly and started walking away, but then I heard Sever shouting into his radio, so I dashed off again. Into the street, a bicyclist swerving and cursing at me, then across someone's terrace and through the lobby of a condo building. I spilled out the back into an alley, looking around wildly. The rev of unseen engines, eager and predatory. Two agents ran by the mouth of the alley, headed for my building. I was standing in full view, but they didn't happen to look over. I jogged the other way, rounded the corner toward Hacmed's store. Stepping out onto the street, I stared at the back of Sever's head. He was standing in the V of his open car door, gazing out at the street. I was so close I could see the white flesh beneath his freshly cropped hairline. I froze. Behind me, around the corner, I heard the crackle of approaching radios.
A dark form lunged at me from beside the Dumpster, hurling a ragged jacket over my head. I heard a muttered word--"Quiet"--and the jacket settled over my shoulders. The weight and stench were staggering. Homer threw an arm over my shoulders and tugged me, stumbling, right past Sever and out into the crosswalk. As Homer bellowed at me in a false slur, I looked at the asphalt, reducing the view of my head from behind. Just a
couple of tottering vagrants. I waited for a shout, a firm hand on my shoulder, pounding footsteps.
Behind me I heard the agents convening around Sever's car. Sever said, "Concentric circles. Let's
go."
Homer and I crossed the street, the jacket's hem drooping to my calves. I had a moment of weakkneed gratitude for my worn-out Pumas, a footwear accent to the slum attire. We stepped into the humid kitchen of a Chinese take-out joint, Homer nodding at the cooks, who looked up as one from their woks and greeted him with kind familiarity. Sidling past sizzling kung pao and vats of rice, we moved through a side door to the rear lot, with its three demarcated parking spots. We threaded between cars and trash barrels, moving west, staying off the main streets and finally winding up in a peaceful yard behind a church. A giant cardboard box, warped from water, sat by the rear door, filled with clothes.
I shrugged off Homer's aromatic coat and handed it back to him. Then I sat on the church's back step and put my hands on my knees. My arms were still shaking. I couldn't get the stench of Mack's burning flesh out of my nostrils.
"You probably just saved my life." My voice was
thin and cracked.
Homer said, "They'll be looking for a guy in a
white shirt," and pointed to the box.
I dug through. Christian-themed T-shirts. I
passed over Soak Up the Son and Tougher Than Nails, settling on the more ecumenical Forgive Us Our Trespasses, with its gray scrolled letters on black. As I pulled it on, a police siren rose to ear-splitting pitch. On the far side of the fence, the vehicle whipped past, and then the sound faded. I had to consciously lower my shoulders.
Homer said, "I checked at the VA for you about finding guys who served with whatever infantry, but admin was unhelpful and stupid." A world-weary nod. "The federal government in action."
"Thanks," I said. "I got the name I needed anyway."
"We'll head to the beach, wait there till night. The tunnels beneath PCH fall between patrol routes, so the cops never check 'em. Plus, they're a pain to get to, have to leave their patrol car. Or unmarked government sedan."
We traced an equally circuitous route, winding up north of San Vicente, where the streets dipped toward sea level. Homer rushed me down a run of stained concrete steps, and then we were saf
e in the tunnel, a few nervous beachgoers on their way back to their cars scurrying past the homeless. It was dank and otherworldly, our footfalls bouncing back as innumerable echoes. The stale air magnified the stench of urine. Homer coughed, the warped sound commanding through the tube until the wind across the far entrance sucked it away. He hooked my arm, and we stopped at the midway
point, sliding to sit, our backs to the curved wall. A ragged man wearing spectacle frames with no glass in them stumbled past, followed by a gaunt woman air-playing a stringless tennis racket like a fiddle. Several more colorless forms, rank with sweat and waste, negotiated and joked and played with their odd, broken props--a homeless circus. The breeze shifted, breathing fresh ocean air through the concrete throat. Pacific Coast Highway thrummed overhead, timpani on endless vibration. The circle of sky at the end glowed with the kinds of colors they name crayons after. It was a weirdly beautiful scene.
I turned to Homer and said, "Thanks for bringing me here."
He said, "Remember to tip the help."
Across from us a skinny, ancient man slumbered under a blanket of newspaper. A headline shouted, INCUMBENT SURGE--BILTON COMING ON STRONG. The consequences of what I carried in the rucksack sent my thoughts rippling outward until the implications grew too vast to comprehend. As the sun descended to the glittering plain of the Pacific, our shadows stretched grotesquely up the curved tunnel walls.
I tilted my head back until it tapped the sweaty concrete. Buried in a piss-drenched tunnel beneath a freeway, on the lam with a homeless alcoholic whose name was an alias. I'd been seen leaving the burning apartment by numerous eyewitnesses.
They could hang Mack's murder on me. They'd been ready to hang Frank's on me for less.
The shooter on the opposing roof could have killed me. But instead of launching the rocket into the bedroom at me, he'd shot it through the open window into the front room. Sever had been waiting in position to grab me. They were planning to sit me in an interrogation room like the one they'd put me in seventeen years ago and use their newfound leverage to squeeze me for answers. Or maybe they had a different plan to make me talk--a chair, restraints, and a gallon of gasoline.
I tugged the two pieces of Mack's key from my pocket. They lined up perfectly at a skinny part between teeth--no missing slivers. A stutter-beat of stress at my temples. I said, "We gotta go."
Homer's breath whistled through his nostrils. "Wait for dark," he said. "For dark." He patted my knee, an uncharacteristically avuncular gesture.
His head nodded forward, and I couldn't help thinking of Charlie's son. The dead weight in my hand as I'd pulled his face up to reveal the gash across his windpipe. Mack hadn't told them what they needed to know, and now they needed me to produce it.
At the tunnel's end, in the constricted, desperate glimpse of sky, the sun dropped from view. Silhouettes disappeared into blackness. All around, the rustle of humanity heightened, somehow connected, bodies rasping and murmuring in concert,
an elaborate windup toy. Among the faceless shadows, all fleeing, all fallen, I felt my eyes well and then tears spill. I kept my throat locked, a hand clamped over my mouth to stanch the dread. Not a sound, just trickles of moisture across my knuckles and an invisible fist in my throat. It wasn't fear, not exactly, but something denser and more awful. It was a cold kind of horror and the weight of a pressure I couldn't withstand.
I'd been kidding myself that I could ever enjoy a normal life. I needed to walk away while I was still on this side of dead, shoulder the rucksack of cash and hop a bus to another city, another state. Leave it all behind again. No matter how awful the prospect, I could start over. I'd done it before.
But then I'd never know. Then maybe no one would ever know.
It was dark now, the tunnel filled with grumbling and snoring. I glanced over and prodded Homer awake. "Can you get me to Montana Avenue without being seen?"
"Of course."
"How?"
"I'm the only person who's not a cleaning lady who actually rides public transportation in this town." He grumbled his way to his feet, then swayed a bit, rocked by malnutrition or boozy fallout. "And nobody sees anyone who's riding a bus in Los Angeles." He belched, pressing both hands to his enormous gut. "What's our business there?"
The jagged pieces of the post-office key poked at the inside of my fist. "I need to see a man about a lock."
Chapter 31
I caught Raz closing up. Stepping from the shadows, I clutched his arm and said, "Can you make a whole out of these halves?" I opened my fist and let the brass pieces glitter. "I'll pay you well."
His burly arms paused from securing the shop's front door. "You into some crazy shit, bro."
He pinched his dense mustache with a thumb and forefinger and led me back inside. I'd left Homer up the street outside the Duck Blind liquor store with a forty of King Cobra. He'd drunk it before I'd finished paying, and he'd elected to stay out back, digging through the trash cans in case anyone had left a swig in the bottom of a discarded bottle.
The shop was dark and cramped, and Raz kept the overheads off, out of respect for the illicit nature of the undertaking. Clicking on a boom-mounted light, he held up the pieces of the key and made a big show of squinting at them. "This will be tough to remake for working key. I do not have seven-pin blank, bro. I told you I must order from Canada."
"I didn't know I'd need it."
"Yes." He sighed sadly. "Yes, they never know until they need. I will use other type. I will try. I will try for you." His wide fingers fussed over a tackle box filled with key blanks. "This is illegal, to copy this key."
"Yes," I said, "it is. But I need to get into that P.O. box."
"Like other P.O. box?"
"Yes."
"What is inside these very important P.O. boxes?"
"I don't know what's inside this one."
He pouched his lips and leaned forward, appraising me. "I help you, bro. But why? I don't know what you do with this key. Maybe I should better call cops on you."
He paused for dramatic effect. Then he clamped the key bit into the milling machine, adjusting screws, gripping handles. "But I don't. That's how it work. Like for my grandfather. First they have him turn in his hunting rifle. For war effort, bro."
He bent to the task, and the cutter head revved up and bit metal. Setting the second piece of the broken key, he did his best to align the angle. He spoke between blazes of sparks, short sentences offset by the shrieking cuts. "Then they tell him he and my grandmother will be relocated. For own good. Always for own good. They were escorted. Escorted, like one of your prom date. Across
Anatolia. On the way they rape the women. Starve many to death. No water. They die in ditches. The skin, like paper over the ribs."
He ran the key along the deburring brush. More sparks flew, creating an orb of light in the dark shop that illuminated his face, his wide, firm cheeks. He did not wear eye gear. For a moment he looked like a boy. He swept his fingers over the teeth of the new key. Then he shook his head, dissatisfied, threw the key into the trash, and started over with a fresh blank. "You know this story. It is same story. Crusades, world wars, Croatia, the Sudan, Iraq. This is mankind."
Again with the deburring brush, again the sparks flew, his face a ruddy portrait in focus. "On the march, a peasant woman hide my grandparents in chicken coop. Why? I do not know. If she was discovered, she would be killed. People help people sometime. They don't know why. But this is also mankind."
He sat back on his creaking stool, stuffing showing through the split vinyl at the sides. He looked at the latest key, his mouth twitching. "I am sorry, bro. Here I go on like windbag about help, but I cannot. I cannot make working key from pieces. Not with substitute key blank. I can order proper key blank from Canada."
"I don't have time to wait."
Raz mused on this weightily, chin set on the boulder of his fist so his cheek rose in wrinkles
beneath the eye. "I have idea. Way to get P.O. box open. One time on
ly. You will have one chance. It is confidence game. You must commit. You can commit?"
I said, "I can commit."
I cased the block by the post office and found no one waiting, but given their technology, if they were hiding, I wouldn't see them. The bus stop was two blocks away, waiting to whisk me back into oblivion. I looped over to Homer, sitting on the curb in a strip-mall parking lot up the street.
"I'm gonna go. Meet me at the bus stop in five?"
He waved me off dismissively.
Tentatively, I approached the Sherman Oaks post office, moving behind trees and parked mail trucks. Every passing car put a charge into me. Finally a break in traffic. I slipped through the front doors and put my back to the wall. The lobby with the counters and registers was locked up, but the wing to the left with the banks of boxes was open as advertised, if dimly lit to discourage nighttime visitors.
A movement from outside caught my eye. Homer strolling boldly down the sidewalk. He shoved through the front doors, regarded me, and said, "What? I got bored."
I let out my breath in a hiss.
He dipped into the trash can by the door, found wrapped taco remains to his liking. "You really
think if they're watching, you tiptoeing in like Sylvester J. Pussycat's gonna keep you under the radar?" He moved on to the supply table, stuffing priority-mail envelopes inside his jacket, either for insulation or just because he could.
I headed back into the banks of P.O. boxes. Crouched in the weak glow of the energy-saving fluorescents, I held the two pieces of the key in my hand and stared at the stamped numbers: 228.
I'd assumed that the P.O. box was at the same location as the last one. The sequential numbers seemed to suggest that, but if the last four days had taught me anything, it was not to expect the obvious. I'd have only one play at this, and it would be hard enough without worrying about failing because I'd taken my shot at the wrong post office.
We Know (aka Trust no One) (2008) Page 18
